Director, Product Management, Practice Fusion
Khan, who used to run gaming products at Nick­el­odeon, now manages user experience at Practice Fusion, a web-based electronic-medical-records company used by more than 150,000 medical professionals.

"When I was at Nickelodeon, I got to look at how billions of users did various things on the Internet: what might motivate them, what might encourage them to exhibit certain behaviors, what people click on. Now I get to take those learnings and apply them to health care.

"The tools that we as technologists have made for doctors have underserved them."

The tools that we as technologists have made for doctors have underserved them. To date, those tools are fairly expensive, and you have to be in a large group of doctors in order to access them. At Practice Fusion, we’ve created a suite of free, ad-supported services that allow doctors to be more productive. You can do charting, manage your appointments, prescribe medicine—all digitally. That seems trivial and obvious, but when you see doctors still using paper, you understand the impact.

In the future, we want physicians to collaborate with one another and with the patient in an efficient way. That’s what everyone in health care is chasing. We already have health records that doctors can allow patients access to. As time goes on, you might imagine things like being able to order a refill, manage appointments, or fill out intake forms online.

The electronic-medical-records market has a lot of players, and we’re a younger company. Our software, from a UI perspective, seems a lot more modern. But we haven’t had as much time with a user base as a company that’s been around a while. Some of our competitors probably have more customer feedback than we do. But we can evolve our product a lot faster. That is our advantage."